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Very hard to compete against Push as Ableton refuses to document their nightmare of an API. Even with Push source code decompiled, it's very difficult to make sense of it all.
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>> And I'm a programmer - don't want to imagine the pains that musicians have to go through. Anyone doing it professionally will check all of their plugins/hardware has support for the latest macOS version before updating.
I can promise you there are many, many professional musicians who will be first in line to upgrade their Mac. I’m a professional programmer it’s not like I test if my mouse or keyboard will work with a new windows update.
We're talking about guys who will use a trackball simply because it makes sure their cursor will be where they left it. Their demands for stability are beyond even what I have seen doing sysadmin at a hospital.
Been making electronic music for well over a decade, but always in the classic DAW arrangement view, at most using MIDI keyboards in terms of haptic input devices but relying on mouse and keyboard 95% of the time. I look at devices like Push or Maschine and my immediate thought is how tedious it seems to get anything done with them. I find the different approaches to manifesting musical ideas endlessly fascinating.
Very hard to compete against Push as Ableton refuses to document their nightmare of an API. Even with Push source code decompiled, it's very difficult to make sense of it all.
Is there a GitHub repo or similar effort where people have been working on this?
Have a look at pushbase and Push2 to look at Push source code.
A starter kit I use when bootstrapping projects: https://github.com/R9295/ableton-live-control-surface-starte...
To the best of my knowledge, this is as far as it goes. The blogs and articles I found are mostly out of date as Ableton has two versions of it's API and blogs mostly use v1. I wouldn't work on anything serious using v1 of the API
Many controllers, including Push use v2 as it's allegedly simpler and more featured. I talked to a person working at Native Instruments and they also told me that their experience with the API was a nightmare.
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Most MIDI keyboards aren't really made for piano performance or even really for piano practice. If you want a MIDI controller for this reason, I'd recommend going to a music store near you (if applicable) and playing a few and feeling the keys and go with the one that feels nicest for your budget.
I bought my wife a Yamaha Arius YDP-184 and she loves it. It's not 100% like the baby grand she does lessons on, but it's close enough for most purposes. It has a MIDI interface, but it's not really easily portable.
I understand why it's expensive, but as a hobbyist who'd want this for some fun at home, I do wish there were a cheaper standalone device without some of the fancy things like MPE and a battery.
There is a lot of groove boxes on the market and seems they're getting more and more siblings, which is nice to see! As a entry-device, Circuit Tracks is nice, immediate and not hard to learn to get your feet wet. It's also way cheaper than Push 3 but obviously a bit more limited. Otherwise, there is a bunch of different devices at different price points, here is a one list sorted by "popularity": https://www.thomann…
I had a (current model) Electribe and it was a bit frustrating, lots of features are technically there but too fiddly/time-consuming to use.
The OP-Z is not in the Thomann list, but I find that to be excellent - and not expensive compared to the OP-1. A rare example of an experts-only UI, it needs to be learned properly in order to do anything really, but once you know how to do it it's nice.
If Behringer ever releases their "HiroTribe" thing that might be a very compelling option on the budget end of the spectrum.
I own a Push 1 and 2, although at hobbyist level. The standalone Push 3 seems a great step forward. macOS has increasingly become user-hostile when it comes to audio (and other pro) users. For instance I have an expensive sound card that became useless with after a minor OS upgrade. I never got to troubleshoot it or find an official solution. That was incredibly discouraging - enough to move on to other hobbies. And…
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Musician here, most of us (the ones that aren't also programmers) just have to pay up the arse every time for every thing. I've been teaching myself keys the last few years and had been planning to one day get myself a big $6k stage keyboard, when I felt that I had sufficiently developed to warrant it. I have since tried out Zynthian, and my conclusion was that with a pianoteq license and a good controller, I can hav…
offtopic, but what keyboard controller do you recommend? I have a cheap MIDI keyboard but the keyfeel is all wrong compared to the upright pianos I used to play as a kid. I'd like to get back into piano, and I know I struggled with phrasing/dynamics, and I worry that unweighted keys will teach me bad habits even though they're technically velocity sensitive...
From the Ondes Martenot [1] to the Haken Continuum fingerboard [2], this type of wiggling finger motion for vibrato is so intuitive, I wish more discrete controllers proposed it as a per-note pitch bend (which MPE makes possible, but can also be achieved with RPN/NRPNs in MIDI 1.x). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlzPHeN1VLQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrmp2EaVChI
Best Hendrix impersonation I've ever heard: https://youtu.be/jh-hzbG5FzI
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A keyboard and a mouse might be faster in some instances, but they are also far less musically expressive. When it comes to putting emotion into music, I think it is a lot easier to do so with an expressive, physically embodied musical instrument. In terms of speed, I'm also not sure how quickly you can create articulations like vibrato and slides with a mouse and keyboard, but that seems like it would be fairly tedi…
Most instruments have parameters for things like vibrato that you can set quickly by "drawing" them with a mouse under the note in reaper (and probably other daws). Slide isn't really a normal thing with midi, you'd need the instrument plugin to explicitly support it using some sort of parameter, but if one was present it'd be easy to set via the mouse.